Lost In Translation (LOL)

Well, I guess there's not actually very much translation going on but I do sometimes get the feeling that there's a communications breakdown of sorts in my office. Allow me to illustrate with the following retelling of a comical anecdote.

Last week, I was handed a fax that had a long paragraph at the top in Japanese (which I couldn't really make sense out of), as well as the following in English, below.

ALT gathering time; AM 11:00
Places; Rokunohe town cultural hall
Content; Prior meeting before it acts of afternoon
Miscellaneous - I will correspond here about the lunch. (Become independence.)
- Shoes for the room are necessary.

I stared for some time at this mysterious and enigmatic text. What was happening? On what day? How exactly does one "become independence"? Well, I was at least able to get out of the Japanese that the event was on Tuesday the 9th, although I still had no idea what the event was. I resigned myself to the belief that these mysteries would probably be unraveled with time.

Well, this week my boss started talking to me about the event, saying that it was a goodbye party. He didn't say for whom and I had no idea who might be leaving but it didn't seem to matter too much. A free lunch on the company dime? Sign me up. So I showed up in Rokunohe yesterday where I met up with Charlie and Alexis. We stood around and talked for a while until an English teacher from one of the schools came into the room and told us that in a few minutes, we would be giving a two-hour presentation to all of the English teachers from the tri-town area on how to teach English speaking in schools. Alexis had apparently been informed of this in advance but Charlie had no idea that anything was going on at all until he came into the office that morning (so he wasn't even really dressed for the occasion).

So that's how I ended up in front of a room of about 30 old Japanese people, being asked to sing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" to them. At least I still got that free lunch.